Victoria Miro presents 'Alchemies', an exhibition of three emerging abstract painters - May Cockcroft, Nour Malas and Sarah Martin-Nuss - in its London gallery from 13 November 2026 to 23 January 2027. The show, part of the gallery's Miro Presents programme, opens with a private view on Thursday 12 November from 6 to 8pm.

The title reaches back to the ancient practice of alchemy, which was always closely tied to artistic making. Each of the three artists transforms colour and material into an evocative visual language of her own. For May Cockcroft, a Cornish artist based in London, it is the ancient landform and rugged coastline of her native Cornwall that drives the physicality of her compositions. She works plaster, chalk, marble dust and charcoal into paint, building layers and then excavating the surface, so that her paintings evoke landscapes shifting over time.

Nour Malas, a Syrian-Canadian artist living in New York, draws on personal and collective history to make emotionally charged, richly coloured canvases in which past and present narratives collapse. Barely perceptible figures occasionally emerge from a vortex of paint, turning ostensibly abstract surfaces into spaces for questions of identity, memory and the search for safety.

Sarah Martin-Nuss, a New York-based artist working across painting, performance and sound, explores flux, emergence and transformation. Working on several paintings at once, she builds layers of oil and pastel that ebb and flow across the canvas, so that colours grow and retreat like sound waves. All three artists are at the start of their careers - Cockcroft completed her MA at the Royal College of Art only this year - which makes the show a first look at three practices to watch.